How Van Halen Explains the U.S. Government

May 1 (Bloomberg) -- Right there on Page 40, in the
“Munchies” section, nestled between “pretzels” and “twelve (12)
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups,” is a parenthetical alert so adamant
you can’t miss it: “M&M’s,” the text reads, “(WARNING:
ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES).”

This is the famed rider to Van Halen’s 1982 concert
contract. In a sentence fragment that would define rock-star
excess forevermore, the band demanded a bowl of M&M’s with the
brown ones laboriously excluded. It was such a ridiculous, over-the-top demand, such an extreme example of superstar narcissism,
that the rider passed almost instantly into rock lore.

It also wasn’t true.

I don’t mean that the M&M language didn’t appear in the
contract, which really did call for a bowl of M&M’s -- “NO BROWN
ONES.” But the color of the candy was entirely beside the point.

“Van Halen was the first to take 850 par lamp lights --
huge lights -- around the country,” explained singer David Lee
Roth. “At the time, it was the biggest production ever.” Many
venues weren’t ready for this. Worse, they didn’t read the
contract explaining how to manage it. The band’s trucks would
roll up to the concert site, and the delays, mistakes and costs
would begin piling up.

So Van Halen established the M&M test. “If I came backstage
and I saw brown M&M’s on the catering table, it guaranteed the
promoter had not read the contract rider, and we had to do a
serious line check,” Roth explained.

Call it the Van Halen principle: Tales of someone doing
something unbelievably stupid or selfish or irrational are often
just stories you don’t yet understand. It’s a principle that
often applies to Washington.

Real Choices

One of President Barack Obama’s favorite examples of
bureaucratic muddle is the government’s management of salmon.
“The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they’re in
fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when
they’re in salt water,” Obama said in his 2011 State of the
Union address. “I hear it gets even more complicated once
they’re smoked.”

As the kids say, LOL. Only there’s a real issue here. The
Department of the Interior supervises rivers and lakes. The
Department of Commerce handles oceans. Salmon, inconveniently,
appear in both. Should there be a new department just to handle
salmon? A new department that oversees all water, regardless of
salinity? Should the Department of Commerce be given all
responsibility for salmon regulation even though they don’t have
the infrastructure to manage rivers?

“The salmon issue isn’t some kind of blunder,” Slate’s
Matthew Yglesias wrote. “It just reflects the fact that large
bureaucracies -- whether private sector or public sector in
nature -- need to make some choices about dividing up
responsibilities. Any set of choices entails dealing with some
edge cases. It’s tough. But absent a constructive suggestion,
just pointing and laughing is silly.”

Last week, Politico reported that members of Congress were
meeting in secret to “exempt” themselves from Obamacare. The
story went instantly viral, receiving almost 100,000 “likes” on
Facebook. For good reason: It would be shocking if Congress were
quietly freeing itself from the Affordable Care Act even as
members demand that the rest of us meekly follow its rules.

The truth is much less shocking and far more boring. Back
when the Affordable Care Act was being drafted, Republican
Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa proposed an amendment requiring
members of Congress and staff to get their health care from an
insurance exchange. Grassley expected the amendment to be
defeated, exposing Democrats as hypocrites who wouldn’t live
under their own health-care regime. Instead, in a moment of
apparent political inspiration, Democrats voted for the
amendment. They would love to be part of Obamacare!

Creating Confusion

The problem is that the insurance exchanges aren’t open to
large employers, and the federal government is the very largest.
The result is utter confusion about whether the federal
government is allowed to buy health insurance from the exchanges
or whether members of Congress and their staffs are on their
own. If Congress were given an “exemption” from the Grassley
amendment, the law would then apply to members and staff in
precisely the same way it applies to every other American
citizen, instead of in the unique manner arising from Grassley’s
mischief.

The administration recently released a draft of its
application to join the Obamacare exchanges. It was 21 pages
long and “as daunting as doing your taxes,” reported the
Associated Press.

This week, the administration released the finished product
-- at five pages. Reviews have been great. But the difference
between the two applications is not so cheery. Most of the pages
in the original were there because the application accommodated
families of six. A single adult would simply leave them blank.

The new application is designed for single adults -- that’s
why it’s short. If, for example, you have a family of six, you
need to obtain the form for families, then “make a copy of Step
2: Person 2 (pages 4 and 5) and complete” for each additional
family member. The Obama administration cut the page count by
making the application much more annoying for big families.

In a similar vein, members of Congress love picking through
federal grants to find dubious-sounding research funded by the
National Institutes of Health or other agencies. In a report
titled “The National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope,”
Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma promised to identify
“over $3 billion in mismanagement at NSF.” Mostly, the report
just mocks research that, superficially, sounds amusing.

Coburn takes gleeful aim at scientists who’ve been running
shrimp on treadmills. According to the scientists, the
treadmills cost about $1,000 out of a half-million-dollar grant.
The point is to determine whether ocean bacteria are weakening
shrimp populations, a development that would tip the entire food
chain into chaos. Coburn’s attack is particularly dangerous,
because it encourages government researchers to conduct science
that sounds good rather than science that does good.

It would be nice if the government’s mistakes were
typically a product of stupidity, venality or bureaucracy. Then
we would need only to remove the idiots, fire the villains and
cut the red tape. More often, the outrageous stories we hear are
cases of decent people trying to solve tough problems under
difficult constraints that we simply haven’t taken the time to
understand. That isn’t to suggest that people in government
don’t get it wrong. They do, repeatedly. But if we want to get
it right, we need to work harder to understand why they decided
to remove the brown M&M’s in the first place.

(Ezra Klein is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions
expressed are his own.)